Welcome Makara!

Today, we announced that Red Hat has acquired Makara.  This acquisition is going to accelerate significantly Red Hat's offerings around Platform as a Service.  Makara includes many capabilities like auto-scaling, fantastic monitoring, and self-service portals for Java and LAMP applications in the cloud.

Combined with Red Hat's Cloud Foundations offerings as well as JBoss and Red Hat middleware platforms, we will be able to deliver the leading PaaS offering with:

• Support for your choice of programming model and language, from full JEE to Spring to Ruby to LAMP and not just a proprietary or restricted API.  This means you can run the broadest set of applications with the benefits of PaaS--including existing applications
• Support for your choice of cloud--whether private or hybrid or public

Red Hat PaaS With Your Choice of Programming Model and Your Choice of Cloud

If you'd like to learn more about Makara's capabilities, you can try them out for free online.

Welcome aboard, Makara, and I look forward to working together!

MRG 1.3 is Released

I'm pleased to announce the release of Red Hat Enterprise MRG 1.3.  MRG 1.3 is a significant update that features many new enhancements, including:

Messaging

MRG 1.3 offers updated clients with improved performance, new protocol version independent C++ and Python clients, Windows C++ client and additional QMF APIs.  Clustering enhancements include durable stores to provide optimized performance in clustered environments and stability improvements.

The update also enables MRG Messaging to be recognized as a supported messaging transport for JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform, and offers security improvements such as SASL support for Python, including Kerberos support.


Realtime
With MRG 1.3, Realtime will move to a 2.6.33-based kernel, and will include the new Performance Counter subsystem in the kernel and the new associated perf performance tool to enable greater performance capabilities for customers.  The update also features new hardware enablement and certifications, which will incorporate a MRG Realtime hardware certification program that is expected to be introduced shortly for 1.3.


Grid
MRG Grid is a key component of Red Hat's Cloud Foundations and also for HPC markets.  The release includes new user tools, Windows Execute Node support, enhanced workflow management, resource restriction capabilities, update configuration management and new admin tools.  With these updates, customers will gain the ability to scale to tens of thousands of devices, be able to provision virtual machines, centralize configuration and management and utilize cloud spill-over capabilities.


For additional information on MRG 1.3, see the official release announcement.

Red Hat Cloud Updates

Red Hat made a number of cloud announcements today:

• Red Hat Cloud Foundations Centers on Portability and Interoperability, Garners Broad Industry Support
• DreamWorks Animation to Utilize Red Hat Cloud Foundations for Future Film Releases
• Red Hat Outlines Comprehensive Platform-as-a-Service Cloud Strategy
• Deltacloud Update & Momentum
• Red Hat Makes Step Toward Common Cloud API in Partnership with DMTF
• APIwanted.org: We Want the Right Cloud APIs

Additionally, I participated in a webcast where we outlined details around these announcements and our strategy.  You can view a replay of the webcast if you missed it live.

Finally, if you'd like additional information on Red Hat's cloud solutions, check out Cloud Foundations and information on the Portable Cloud.  

Condor Week 2010 Presentations

This week is Condor Week, and this is always a big event for the Condor project, from which we build MRG Grid.  Red Hat has a strong partnership with the University of Wisconsin, and we are happy to participate in this year's event with two presentations today.

In case you're not able to attend the sessions in person, here are links to them:

• Red Hat MRG by Matthew Farrellee
• Improving Condor Configuration Management with  Wallaby by Will Benton and Rob Rati

New IBM Cloud Built on Red Hat

Today, IBM is introducing their new enterprise cloud, and they are building that cloud on top of Red Hat offerings, including Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization.  This is yet another example of the growing number of public clouds built on and certified with Red Hat (Amazon EC2 was the pioneer in our Certified Cloud provider program).

Here's a quote from the press release:

Our decade-long partnership with Red Hat has always been focused on customer value and innovation.  Today, we are extending this partnership to include cloud computing – broadening our reach and answering the strong customer demand for cloud computing services," said Maria Azua, vice president of Cloud Computing Enablement at IBM.  "Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization is an optimal hypervisor technology for the infrastructure offerings on the IBM cloud."

Virtualization is one of the foundational technologies of cloud computing, so it's great to see that when it came to building its own cloud, IBM chose Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization as the optimal solution amongst all the available possibilities in the market.

Open Source Energy Savings with Condor

Forbes has an article today on Open Source Energy Savings using Condor.  In addition to highlighting how Condor can help with saving energy in a data center, the article features Red Hat  and our work around Condor with Red Hat Enterprise MRG a couple times:

Two years ago Red Hat  worked out a partnership deal with the university to make Condor open source using the Apache Foundation license.

and

Paul Cormier, president of products and technologies at Red Hat, is working on combining a large collection of open source projects into a cloud provisioning and management suite. "The move to cloud computing as the next generation architecture has only been possible by integrating many of these open source projects, such as Condor," says Cormier. "It is only natural that the software for creating and managing these virtual environments come from the world of open source as well."

The energy savings policies you can implement with Condor are nice, but we see these features as truly beneficial for most enterprises as part of a cloud solution.  For example, we have added virtualization support to Condor, which can further improve power management in a cloud deployment.  Let's say you had two servers each running at 50% capacity with one virtual machine job on each of them.  You could have a Condor job which moved one of the virtual machine jobs to the other server, consolidating all work on one machine.   Then, you could have a Condor job turn off the other machine.

Red Hat Virtual Experience 2009

This Wednesday December 9, 2009, Red Hat will be hosting its Red Hat Virtual Experience event focused on cloud computing.  I have a session there in the afternoon regarding MRG:

Building and Leveraging Compute Clouds with Red Hat Enterprise MRG

This presentation will cover the current state of Red Hat's cloud efforts and provide technical information that details how to build a cloud infrastructure based on Red Hat's technologies and blueprints. The presentation will also provide an overview of the capabilities and features Red Hat Enterprise MRG and Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtualization jointly provide and how workload scheduling and virtualization can be used as an enterprise management platform.

There's also many other great sessions.  You can see the agenda here.

The Red Hat Virtual Experience 2009 is free to attend, and you can register here.

How to Forward Your Mobile Phone's Voicemail to Google Voice with a Full Google Voice Account (and Still Use Your Mobile Phone with Your Google Number)

Google recently announced the option to use Google Voice with your existing number.  By selecting this option when you sign up for Google Voice, Google Voice effectively becomes an enhanced voicemail service with capabilities like SMS alerting, archiving, and transcripts, but you lose out on many other great features like ringing multiple phones or ListenIn.  Given this, I'm not sure why anyone would want to sign up for this limited service.

Instead, you can sign up for a full Google Voice account and get Google Voice voicemail for your existing number--plus preserve the option to use all of Google Voice's other features with a new number if you like.  With this option, whether someone calls your mobile phone number or your Google number, Google Voice will handle your voicemail.

Here's how to setup your mobile phone to use Google Voice's voicemail with a full Google Voice account:

1. Sign up for a Google Voice account.  Note that you'll need an invite to join, currently
2. Select the option to create an account with a Google Number rather than a non-Google number
3. Add your mobile phone to your Google Voice account
4. Go to Settings in Google Voice and click on the "Activate Google voicemail on this phone" link
5. Follow Google Voice's popup instructions to forward your phone's voicemail to Google Voice
   
6. Go back to Settings in Google Voice and click the "Edit" link on the settings for your mobile phone
7. Click "Show advanced settings"
8. Under the "Forwarding Options" section, set "Go straight to voicemail."  This will ensure that Google Voice won't try to ring your other phones once your mobile phone has forwarded to voicemail

That's it!  Now, when someone calls your mobile phone number and you don't answer, it will go to Google Voice's voicemail--just like with Google's Google Voice With Your Own Number service.  But, you still have the option to switch to your Google number in the future and take advantage of all of Google Voice's other features.  So, for example, if someone calls your Google number, it will also ring your mobile phone.

Cloud Storage Hubbub

Why is it that the media is still writing articles about whether Microsoft and T-Mobile's Sidekick data loss issue is going to put a damper on cloud storage, but nobody is asking whether Apple's bug in Snow Leopard that deletes all personal data is going to stop people from storing data locally?  Articles reporting initially on each incident came out within a few days of each other.

Part of the reason that the Sidekick failure--and it is a catastrophic failure--is causing people to question cloud storage is because everyone is writing articles asking this question.  But, nobody is writing articles asking anything similar about Apple.

The Sidekick incident doesn't illustrate a fault of cloud storage versus local storage--it just shows that you still need to care about protecting your data, no matter where you store it.  Maybe the fact that everyone is writing about Sidekick rather than Snow Leopard illustrates that Cloud Computing is even sexier and more buzz-worthy than Apple!

MRG Presentations and Videos from the Summit

I'm back from Chicago from another great Red Hat Summit.  I have uploaded my two presentations from the 2009 Red Hat Summit online:

• Red Hat Enterprise MRG Update
• Building and Leveraging Compute Clouds with Red Hat Enterprise MRG

As an additional treat, you can also view videos of one of my sessions, as well as our CTO Brian Stevens' keynote, which highlighted cloud computing with MRG and other technologies.  I can't link to the videos directly, but you can find them at

• http://www.redhat.com/promo/summit/2009/highlights/ 

Brian Stevens' keynote is on the first tab.  My MRG presentation is on the Summit Sessions tab.

Finally, you can watch a demo video of cloud computing with Red Hat Enterprise MRG.  In this video, I bridge and aggregate three different clouds together (a local render cloud, an internal cloud provisioned by Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, and Amazon EC2) into one seamless render cloud for film rendering.  This video created quite a buzz at the Summit, so enjoy!

Red Hat Enterprise MRG at the Red Hat Summit

Next week is the Red Hat Summit in Chicago.  We'll be featuring Red Hat Enterprise MRG there prominently:

• Building and Leveraging Compute Clouds with Red Hat Enterprise MRG
  
• MRG Messaging: A Programmer's Overview 
• Red Hat Enterprise MRG (Messaging, Realtime, Grid) Update and Roadmap
• A booth demonstrating cloud computing with MRG
• A special demo during our CTO Brian Stevens' keynote on cloud computing

I'll be at the Summit presenting the cloud computing and MRG update sessions.  I hope to see you there!

(The direct links to the sessions at the summit web site don't load that well due to the fancy javascript on that site.  You can go to http://www.redhat.com/promo/summit/2009/agenda/tracks/ and find the tracks manually to get a much better view of the info)

MRG In The Open Source Cloud Computing Forum

Red Hat is hosting an online event, the Open Source Cloud Computing Forum, on July 22, 2009.  Matt Farrellee from the MRG team will be presenting on how Condor, the Grid component in MRG, helps with building and adopting clouds during the 5th session at 11:30am.

The event is free also features lots of other great sessions.  Read more about it here and then register to attend!

Cloud, Utility, Grid and Other Mixed Metaphors

I've written a new blog post for press.redhat.com: Cloud, Utility, Grid and Other Mixed Metaphors.  It discusses three terms that people typically use together but are often unclear about how they fit: cloud computing, utility computing, and grid computing.  The post illustrates the differences between the concepts and also describes how they fit together by using Red Hat Enterprise MRG as an example of how to achieve all three. 

Check out the post at http://press.redhat.com/2009/06/18/cloud-utility-grid-and-other-mixed-metaphors/.

Corporate, Customer, and Academic Open Source Communities for Next Generation Software

I submitted a paper for the NSF's Cyberinfrastructure Software Sustainability & Reusability Workshop.  I discuss some of the innovative open source models we've used to develop Red Hat Enterprise MRG:

The NSF is looking both at models of how to build sustainable cyberinfrastructure software as well as specific software that will benefit its goals like providing communities with access to a “world class high performance computing (HPC) environment.” Red Hat Enterprise MRG, a high performance distributed computing platform which integrates Messaging, Realtime, and Grid capabilities, provides both an open source model of how academic researchers, customers, and corporations can collaborate as well as powerful software infrastructure which can help the NSF meet its next-generation cyberinfrastructure goals.

For example, I discuss the partnership we have with the University of Wisconsin around Condor for Grid scheduling:

This partnership between UW and Red Hat is adding many innovative capabilities to Condor and also expanding significantly Condor's reach from research environments to enterprises. For example, Red Hat has focused on adding many capabilities which enterprises require for deployment but which are not paramount for academia. These enhancements range from new graphical management tools to enterprise maintainability to concurrency limits on scarce resources like software licenses. Furthermore, Red Hat has also focused on advancing Condor towards utility and cloud models of computing by adding capabilities like libvirt virtualization support and Amazon EC2 integration. Many enterprises are now looking at MRG and Condor for building private clouds and moving to cloud computing.

The paper also discusses how we're feeding back developments from the enterprise into academia, how we've collaborated with customers and users around AMQP and messaging, how the technologies in MRG can help the NSF meet its software goals around sustainable HPC, and so on.

You can see the submission at the NSF's site for papers.

You can also directly download a pdf of the paper from the NSF's site: Corporate, Customer, and Academic Open Source Communities for Next Generation Software.

Upcoming Events: JBoss Virtual Experience and SCALE 2009

I'll be at a pair of events in the next couple weeks: the JBoss Virtual Experience and the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) 2009. 

At the JBoss Virtual Experience, I'll be manning a virtual booth to talk about Red Hat Enterprise MRG and Cloud Computing.  MRG Grid's support for virtualization and also integration with Amazon EC2 makes it a powerful tool for companies that either want to leverage the cloud or build their own cloud.  If you're attending the JBoss Virtual Experience, stop by the booth!

At SCALE, I'll be giving a talk, Introduction to Realtime Linux.    If you've wondered about Realtime Linux's benefits, performance characetristics, state, or just what it is, this will be a useful session to attend.  You can read about the rest of Red Hat and Fedora's presence at SCALE as well.

High Performance on Wall St

I'll be at the High Performance on Wall St show tomorrow in NYC at the Roosevelt Hotel.  This should be an interesting show, despite (in part, because of?) the recent turmoil on Wall St--all the recent financial calamity isn't going to reduce financial service's need for computational power.

I'm going to be speaking on a panel at 4pm on "Building The Perfect Financial Services Data Center."  Red Hat has a booth (#102), where we'll be debuting publicly the new GUI Tools we've developed around Condor for Red Hat Enterprise MRG as well as showing off our integration between MRG and Amazon's EC2 Cloud.  Come check us out if you're at the show!

Red Hat Summit 2008 (and FUDCon!)

Tomorrow is the start of the 2008 Red Hat Summit in Boston. There are going to be several sessions related to Red Hat Enterprise MRG there:

• Thursday 1:30pm: Realtime Linux: Who, What, When, Where and Why by Clark Williams. Clark is the tech lead for realtime at Red Hat, so he'll have a lot of good stuff to say about performance results, how we've developed realtime, what's happening in the open source community, what's planned for the future, and so on.
• Thursday 4:00pm: Red Hat Enterprise MRG Overview by Carl Trieloff. Carl is the technical director and visionary behind MRG, so this will be a great opportunity to hear first-hand about the origins, successes, and benefits of MRG. Way back, I spent over a year working to get Carl into Red Hat to launch and drive our MRG initiatives. Now, after creating AMQP, starting new open source projects, bringing realtime to maturity, and signing our partnership with the University of Wisconsin around Condor, we are starting to see significant traction around MRG.
• Friday 9:00am: Dynamic Grid Computing With Red Hat Enterprise MRG & Amazon EC2 by Bryan Che. That's me! I hope you can get up early enough to attend my session. I'll be presenting on the work we've been doing to enable dynamically provisioning grid capacity at Amazon EC2's cloud infrastructure right from your MRG Grid's Condor scheduler. This will enable enterprises to add capacity dynamically to existing data centers or even to provision entire grids on-demand in the cloud. Cloud computing is hot these days, and we are seeing a lot of customer interest in MRG's integration with EC2.

This week also marks the start of FUDCon 2008 in Boston. Matt Farrellee, who is our tech lead for Condor and MRG Grid, will be coming to town to help lead discussions on implementing Fedora Nightlife. Of course, I'll be there too.